Publishers don’t care about gamers, only profits

Oddworld creator Lorne Lanning believes publisher’s push out “incomplete” triple-A games just to please shareholders, without consideration for the hard work put in by developers and the experience of the player.

“I’d rather not make games than go f***ing be a slave for public companies who care more about their shareholders than they do about their customers,” said Lanning in an interview with VG24/7.

“Why did Battlefield 4 ship? You know that team was crying. You know that team knew that game wasn’t ready to go… “F**k that business. I don’t want to play with that business, because it was a losing business,” he said.

“You know that team f***ing spent a lot of sleepless nights building that s**t out to look as good and play as good… as they were intending it to be played. Someone made a decision that the shareholders are more important than the customer. And we see a lot of that. How do you blow that? How do you take that f***ing jewel and ship it with dirt all over it?”

Lanning recently spoke about his plans to launch a new Oddworld game if his latest creation New ‘n Tasty sold over 500,000 copies. He said the game, which will retail for just over R300, would look and play better than games that cost R650.00. “If this had a publisher, the price would be higher and they’d be calling it a triple-A,” he said.

Go for the money or give gamers the best experience possible – what should publishers be focused on? Let us know in the comments and forum.